Occupying the university. The institutional public sphere and strategies of civility

This paper analyses the political significance of one of the 2024 Belgian university occupations led by students protesting the war in Gaza. After recounting the events that took place at the University of Liege, it analyzes the event as the establishment of an institutional public sphere, drawing from a critical theory perspective (Habermas, Negt, Kluge and Fraser) to point out its modalities of discursive production and of occupation of physical and embodied space. The analysis suggests that we owe to these discursive productions and utilizations of space—which are symbolic and material practices—the ability to give rise to “civility” (Étienne Balibar), distinguishing three strategies of anti-violence at play. In all, the paper argues that this particular occupation is to be seen as a political experiment taking the form of a resistance to a historical tragedy and of a collective exercise of active citizenship, within the very sphere of the Institution.